Pierre Bonnard

The Phillips Collection

The French artist Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) was both precocious and late blooming. He started fast. By 1888 he was in the thick of the Parisian vanguard, part of a group of young painters, with his lifelong friend Edouard Vuillard, who called themselves the Nabi (the prophets) and emulated Gauguin. Bonnard was a sought-after designer of posters and illustrator of books and an innovative printmaker; he made puppets and designed theater sets.

Bonnard wrote, ''There is always color, it has yet to become light.'' This transformation was the project of his final decades. By then he had narrowed his subjects down to his immediate, most intimate surroundings. Over and over Bonnard painted the rooms he inhabited and their garden views; his enigmatic, ageless wife, Marthe, whether bathing, bent over her morning cup of coffee or laying the table for lunch, often shadowed by a household pet.

Working simultaneously on several unstretched canvases tacked directly to the wall, he painted largely from memory with the help of quick sketches and watercolors, burnishing his motifs until they approached incandescence. He said that painting from reality distracted him from the task of making the painting a freestanding entity.

In his best works, seeing and feeling merged in forms that glowed from within; decorative and subjective became one. It's not just the colors that radiate in a Bonnard; there's also the heat of mixed emotions, rubbed into smoothness, shrouded in chromatic veils and intensified by unexpected spatial conundrums and by elusive, uneasy figures. — Roberta Smith

January 20, 2012, Friday

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the time Pierre Bonnard spent in Normandy, the Museum of the Impressionists in Giverny, France, is showing 80 paintings and drawings that he created during his time there.